All Flesh Must be Eaten Revised

As they approach your home, the evening wind carries their stench through the air. Your dog barks wildly, frenzied by the smell. You awaken from a restless sleep, look out your window and see staggering corpses on the move.

You are halfway down the stairs when you hear footsteps on the porch. You run into the living room and pry open your gun cabinet. As you fumble, the front door collapses from the weight of a pair of rotting corpses. They shamble into the hall, arms outstretched, reaching for you. You unload your shotgun into them. They fall back. To your horror, they rise . . .

Welcome to the World of Survival Horror!

All Flesh Must Be Eaten is a complete roleplaying game. In it, you will find:

Eleven different Deadworld settings allowing customization of the storyline

A comprehensive zombie creation system to surprise and alarm players

A list of equipment crucial to surviving a world of shambling horrors

Detailed character creation rule for Norms, Survivors and the Inspired

A full exposition of the Unisystem rule mechanics, suitable for any game in any time period

Open Game License conversion text for porting AFMBE to your favorite d20 modern campaign

Note: This edition is no different in content than the previous two printings; only typos and errata have been corrected. The only NEW material added to this book are the Open Game License conversions in the appendix as well as a grisly new cover.

The rules are easy to learn. The creators clearly know their zombie fiction. And the DIY zombie creation chapter is a lot of fun.

But by GOD does Unisystem have a way of making this game awkward.

Say you want to shoot a Nazi zombie in the head. Not an unlikely thing to want to do in a zombie game. First you roll a d10 to hit. Then the zombie rolls a d10 to dodge. Then you roll for hit location. Then you roll for damage. Then the zombie rolls for his helmet armour. That's FIVE stages of dice rolling to find out if the zombie is dead or not.

Also, on any of those stages you rolled a d10, did you get a 1 or a 10? If so, it triggers extra positive or negative results - that'll be another die roll, maybe more. And this is the core resolution mechanic, requiring successive stages of dice rolling 20% of the time that you try to do ANYTHING. You also have to calculate your degree of success or failure on a chart with extremely inconsistent range bands, which makes learning...See more it by heart difficult, and thus requiring you to look up the outcome of actions with reference material most of the time.

This isn't a crunchy system. Like I said, the rules are easy to learn - once you've got the core resolution mechanic sorted, the game has little left to teach you. But unfortunately it is a SLOW system. Combat takes forever, as each player crawls their way through roll after roll. Combat with zombies shouldn't be like this. It should be wild and bloodsoaked, in an action setting, or desperate and terrifying if you're aiming for horror. Both of those genres live and die on their pacing, and in that regard All Flesh is as dead as its shambling antagonists.

It's a shame, because the multi-setting, GM toolbox approach to campaign design is really cool. I could imagine myself getting very excited about this game when it first came out fifteen years ago. These days, roleplayers can do better.

(I never review a game I haven’t played or run. Check out http://michaelduxbury.com/category/reviews/ for more RPG reviews.)

Łukasz KOctober 31, 2014 9:42 am UTC

PURCHASER

It would be good if the next revision included the converted values for metric units in the whole book (e.g. currently the vehicles lack this). Most of the world uses the SI units, it might be nice to give them something they (me) can work comfortably with :-).

The revised version of the core rulebook begins with an Introduction by Shane Lacy Hensley, in which he discusses the popularity of zombies in movies, books and role-playing games. This, like much of the content, is similar to the original core ruleboo [...]

The rules are fairly simple. 9 is the target number to roll for all actions, after modifiers. There are three types of characters. The first, and my personal favorite of the three, is Norms. They are average people such as you or me. They will probably [...]

A solid game backed up with extensive options to customise both characters and zombies. Its ideal for a quick pick-up game using the provided archetypes and one of the deadworlds contained within. The only downside is this product isn't bookmar [...]

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